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A dinner party for squirrels has nuts on the menu

When Corey Mintz prepares a three-course meal for some squirrels in a Toronto park, he finds they won’t eat their vegetables unless they’re smeared with hazelnut butter. A thank you would have been nice.

A squirrel takes an apple slice from the three-course banquet Corey Mintz prepared for the squirrels in Grange Park. (David Cooper / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Corey Mintz sets out a banquet for the eastern grey squirrels he lives alongside. But it was all done in the name of science -- people shouldn't feed the squirrels at all, he says. (David Cooper / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Toronto has a love-hate relationship with squirrels so messy it makes Sean Penn and Robin Wright’s third divorce look like Sean Penn and Robin Wright’s first divorce.

Squirrel fans toss them peanuts. Detractors compare them to rats.

The presence of these banh mi-sized, acrobatic mammals, jumping from tree to tree, scrambling between cars on the road, tightrope walking across telephone wires, can seem so ubiquitous in Toronto, you’d think they were common everywhere. But while the eastern grey squirrel (the black ones are another shade of the same species) is well-known from Quebec down to Florida, they’re exotic to most tourists.

Visitors from Japan or Australia, where they’re used to being pestered by crows and red foxes, marvel at the creatures as they stand on their hind legs, looking like little gentlemen, eating a hot dog nub with two hands.

I’ve never fed a squirrel until today. And today is the day they decide they’re not interested.

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My bedroom is on the third floor, beneath an attic, home to a family of squirrels. When my alarm goes off at 7 a.m. I can hear clawing above me.

Squirrels are diurnal, mostly active at dawn and dusk.

A squirrel’s life consists of chasing and being chased by other squirrels, jumping, playing, finding food, eating food, hiding food under leaves, seeking to mate twice a year, finding more food, hiding more food.

And doing the same damn thing the next day.

Sometimes I watch them from my desk and wish I could leap from roof to roof, to be free of social conflicts, disappointments, worrying about renting versus owning, with no deadlines except the looming threat of winter.

I spend as much time in the company of squirrels as any human, so why not have a meal with them? A good reason is that humans shouldn’t feed squirrels.

A 1975 study of the squirrels in Mount Pleasant cemetery determined that the only factor controlling population size was how many young squirrels, which have a high mortality rate, make it to adulthood and disperse. Nathalie Karvonen, director of the Toronto Wildlife Centre, tells me that the reason baby squirrels are able to survive in high numbers here is that people feed them. And if you do like squirrels, know that feeding them lessens their fear of humans, and by extension, their main urban predator, cats.

In the wild, they’d eat acorns, insects, even getting occasional protein from bird eggs. Though they get some of that in Toronto, more commonly they emerge from trash bins clutching pizza crusts or candy bar wrappers. In the park, people feed them peanuts, which have little nutritional value.

“Squirrels like peanuts the way kids like cake,” says Karvonen. “But you shouldn’t be feeding squirrels at all.”

OK. But they’re my neighbours. It couldn’t hurt to sit down to one meal with them.

I thought about making them teeny sandwiches that would look big in their paws. Instead, I assemble a three-course meal, to study their selection process. First I have raw fruits and vegetables: purple grapes, sliced Cortland apples, broccoli, yellow zucchini, carrots. To follow that are cooked vegetables: broccoli, sweet potato, zucchini, collard greens. To finish, treats: hazelnut brittle, walnuts in the shell and large chunks of roasted butternut squash filled with hazelnut butter.

I place the first course on the table outside. My photographer sets up his camera with a remote activator, allowing him to shoot from inside. I make a cup of coffee for my scientific adviser, who absolutely doesn’t want her name in the paper due to the terrible science I’m practising (we are breaking the prime directive as impulsively as Captain Kirk or Jane Goodall, who, despite later achievements in primatology, began her career by setting out bananas for wild chimpanzees, who soon became violent). The three of us sit down to wait for our guests.

But no one shows up. The maple tree that looms above my house, used by the animals to travel between buildings, is empty, its orange leaves swaying in the breeze, undisturbed.

“Welcome to field research,” says my scientific adviser, showing me the tiny cups and saucers she’d brought for the squirrels.

We head to the park, where the species coexists with dogs amidst much goading and sabre-rattling.

After we set out the feast on a picnic table, they approach all at once, a dozen of them, but meander around the table for over an hour, until we draw a trail of hazelnut butter leading them to the food. Once they find it, they have zero interest in the vegetables, only touching the zucchini when it’s smeared with hazelnut butter. They gobble up the nut candy, carrying the walnuts away for later consumption.

I’m not sure what I expected. An anthropomorphic tea party, where the squirrels invite me to sit with them, saying please and thank you and sharing with me their tiny flask of squirrel whiskey made of fermented walnuts? Was that so much to ask for?

Maybe. I mean, a thank you would have sufficed, a mere nod and chitter from one of them.

Karvonen, who doesn’t want anyone feeding squirrels, is at least relieved at one thing.

“When you told me you were a food writer, I was worried,” she’d said. “I thought you were writing something about eating squirrels.”

Maybe next week, if anyone has a recipe.

Email and follow @coreymintz on Twitter. His book, How To Host A Dinner Party, is in bookstores.

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